What Knowledge Is Important to a Software Professional?

S oftware engineering licensing bodies, universities designing curricula, companies focusing on better training for their staff, and the IEEE in its Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) project are all pursuing efforts to define the subject matter that software professionals should know. Whereas most groups are basing their decisions about the software engineering curriculum on the opinions of experts in the field, we were more interested in learning what subject matter practitioners themselves actually find most important in their work. From May to October 1998, my colleagues and I surveyed software professionals representing a wide variety of industries, job functions, and countries to learn which educational topics have proved most important to them in their careers and to identify the topics for which their education or current knowledge could be improved. We used the responses to the 75 questions in our survey to develop three sets of data: the importance of various topics taught in computer science, software engineering, and computer engineering curricula, the emphasis educational institutions place on these topics, and what practitioners believe they currently know about the topics. Our survey reinforces current perceptions about the importance of some topics, but it also highlights topics that are sometimes underemphasized or overemphasized. For example, the survey results indicate that education programs emphasize mathematics, chemistry , and physics more than their importance to practitioners seems to warrant; furthermore, practitioners tend to forget this material. On the other hand, there is a clear knowledge gap and a reliance on on-the-job learning for topics related to software processes, people skills, and human-computer interaction. The sources of information about the knowledge that is important to software engineering include the latest technical literature, existing educational programs and licensing requirements, and the overviews of the field that experts are developing. This survey incorporates significant improvements in methodology, questions, and sampling compared to our original survey on the importance of software engineering topics conducted in 1997. 1,2 Additional data from the current survey has been published elsewhere 3 and is also available at The results of this survey should be useful to licensing and accreditation bodies, corporate training departments, and curriculum designers in universities, colleges, and training institutes. Students and professionals seeking continuing education will also be able to use the data to help select courses. We recruited participants for the survey by directly approaching companies and by advertising on the Internet. Most participants used a …